WMD

[Tom]

Where are they? Were they ever there?
What do you think?

[BetHorses!]

They were there but moved to Syria.

[cj]

"They are still there -but hidden somewhere"

Look beneath those veils, that is some scary shit under there.

[kenwoodallpromos]

Explosives moved to Iran. Now being used against us. And El Kyda used some in Bali.

[Secretariat]

All we know for sure is GW checked underneath his desk and they aren't there, at least according to what he tells us.

[kenwoodallpromos]

That was Clinton who had the poison bombshell under the desk!LOL!

[fergie]

They were both there, and Donald Rumsfeld took possession of them both and keeps them in his locker at the Whitehouse, except for when he has a meeting with GW, when hre shoves them up his butt and begins with "This is going to seem like a bombshell to you, George, but--":D

[hcap]

Anyone recall bush's lame black-tie dinner for Radio and Television Correspondents ??

Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office. He said: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. Bush said "Nope. No weapons over there." Then another picture of Bush searching in his office. He said "Maybe under here."

Maybe after all this time bush can apologize for the low point of comedyroutines or deffinitely say "here they are" and put an end to this disgrace.

So if they have been moved, why can't they support it with evidence? Ya gotta believe they would if they could

And his comedy act....
Asshole performance

[lsbets]

Serious question - not trying to flame, so those who wish to just argue endlessly please don't reply. But this is a serious question for those who feel Iraq did not have WMDs, because I am trying to understand the basis for that belief.

If you take it as incontrovertable fact that at one time Iraq did have WMDs (thousands of dead Kurds are proof of that), what do you think happenned to them? In 1998 Iraq was playing cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors, then we pulled them out and bombed Iraq's facilities.
Do you think they were all destroyed then? If not, what happenned to them?
Did Saddam decide they're just not worth the trouble and get rid of them? How do you explain the small quantities of chemical weapons that have been found, and in two cases used against U.S. troops?

In my mind, the most important, and unanswered (and frankly not discussed nearly enough) question we have regarding Iraq is what happenned to the chemical and biological weapons. We know with 100% certainty that at one time Iraq had large quantities of both. We have no clue what happenned to them. That should be very troubling to everyone. Was the senior Iraqi Air Force general telling the truth when he said they were all flown out to Syria?

[GMB@BP]

not sure this is on topic, did anyone here the tapes of Suddam and his cronies talking about what the course of action in regards to chemical weapons that could take out a "100,000" with no problem? I doubt you will see this in the NYT but it definately shows they had intention and the means. What happened to the stuff, whole different issue.

[ljb]

Serious question - not trying to flame, so those who wish to just argue endlessly please don't reply. But this is a serious question for those who feel Iraq did not have WMDs, because I am trying to understand the basis for that belief.

If you take it as incontrovertable fact that at one time Iraq did have WMDs (thousands of dead Kurds are proof of that), what do you think happenned to them? In 1998 Iraq was playing cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors, then we pulled them out and bombed Iraq's facilities.
Do you think they were all destroyed then? If not, what happenned to them?
Did Saddam decide they're just not worth the trouble and get rid of them? How do you explain the small quantities of chemical weapons that have been found, and in two cases used against U.S. troops?

In my mind, the most important, and unanswered (and frankly not discussed nearly enough) question we have regarding Iraq is what happenned to the chemical and biological weapons. We know with 100% certainty that at one time Iraq had large quantities of both. We have no clue what happenned to them. That should be very troubling to everyone. Was the senior Iraqi Air Force general telling the truth when he said they were all flown out to Syria?

We know that thousands of Kurds were killed using chemical weapons.
With the flyovers and spy satellites don't you think we should know more about this? Perhaps the majority of Saddam's chemical weapons were used on the Kurds ? This would explain the minimal amount found.
All we really know for sure is Saddam did use chemical weapons on the Kurds.
In my mind the most important question is: Why did this administration pump up the fear and cherry pick data to enforce their decision to invade Iraq ?

[hcap]

Charles Duelfer, David Kay. Both have reported nothing of consequence. The CIA gave sites to the UN inspectors before the war to check and nothing found. Rummy "knew" where they were-nothing found.

What happened to the WMDs?

The stockpiles for the most part were destroyed by UN inspection teams. Much of the chemical and biologicals degraded to the point of unusability. Iraq began dismantling its arsenal when UN inspectors arrived in September 1991. At that point, Iraq had massive programs, massive stockpiles and was not cooperating with the UN. In 1992, the UN continued to push Iraq on the whereabouts of WMD, and it admitted to unilaterally destroying the weapons. By 1996, ninety to ninety-five percent of Iraq’s WMD were known to have been destroyed. -Scott Ritter

Before you claim Ritter was a child molester or a stooge for Iraq, just remember he, Blix and others were correct all along.

Yeah there were no inspections after 1998 and some reasons to be concerned, but bottom line? We know now that if we had waited for the UN inspectors to complete their task, this entire mess could have been handled in a different way. Rush to war

Saddam Hussein had no WMDs—at least none of any consequence or that posed an imminent danger to the United States. Certainly nothing that would warrant a rushed invasion. And nukes were a Neocons' wet dream.

[lsbets]

So you completely discount what the top Iraqi AF general said about flying planeloads of chemical weapons to Syria?

BTW - other members of the inspection teams tell a far different story than Ritter, more similar to the one Ritter was telling in 98, versus the one he began telling in 2002. Do I question Ritter's credibility? Yes, and not just because he is a child molester.

[hcap]

All we have is Mr. Sada's word for it. Where is the administration on the general? You would think the bushies would red carpet him to the white house and bow down to him. At last someone who agrees with them.

Sada had no direct involvement in this. He relates the story told by Iraqi pilot friends.

But here are plenty of people who are unhappy with the Syrians in Iraq,and for that matter in Syria, however, none have come forward to corroborate WMD's in Syria.

There should have been some eyewitnesses on both sides of the border who could come forward and verify that Sada's account is true. So far there are none.

According to the Sun article-convoys of trucks were needed to load the 2 planes Sada talks about. The smuggling was done in the Summer of 2002, right as the US and the UK were stepping up their bombing campaigns in advance of their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Our forces did not detect these convoys.

Once again the mantra "absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.", is not supportable by reality. The burden of proof is on loyal bushmen to come up with the actual evidence, not heresay and not for us to disprove it.

What other members of the UN inspection team tell a different story. The fianal word from Blix and El Baradei say nada on WMDs

[Tom]

ls...my point exactly - where are thye and why are they not now a threat enough to go into Syria after thme? Getting those WMD if they are indeed out there is far more important to me than Iraqi elections of democracy - heel, we have the coordinates of everything in Iraq - we just destroy them if they get out line again. I am through worrying about Iraqi asses and am only concerned with my own.


And, many of us on the right side of the world (:D ) have complained that Clinton did not take out OBL when that drone took his picture years ago...I have to ask Bush the same question...all those satellite photos Colin Powell took to the UN - why din't we just take out those alleged WMD when we had them in our view finder?

We have our troops tied up in Iraq, our borders are almost completely open, we only inspect about 4% of containers coming into our ports, and now we plan on assigning thier security to an arab nation that helped finance 9-11, supplied two of the death pilots, and recognized the taliban as the legitimate governement on Afghanistan.

Why should I be concern about missing WMD that were once grounds for a war and now are not even mentioned by the administration anymore?

BTW...I agree with OBL on one thing - this fighting them over there is ridiculous. With over 2,000 dead already, and who knows how many more dead after the fact and not counted, and how many disabled......haven't we already passed the net effects of 9-11? We are tryinging to avoid the next 9-11, but we have already had it. This one was worse - just stretched out. And we financed this second attack ourselves.

[lsbets]

Hcap - I have no clue where the administration is on Sada, and I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out the lack of political sense when it comes to Bush. I know you guys like to think of Rove as some evil genius, but I think Bush does the worst job of PR of any President I have ever seen. You would have thought that when the mustard and sarin rounds were used, they would have trumpeted that. You would have thought that when even the smallest quantity of something were found they would have trupmeted that. Good news? They don't really talk about any of it. Even something as simple as recognizing some of the incredibly heroic actions that have taken place gets ignored by the WH. They spoke publicly about things leading up to the invasion, then ignored it until the election in 04. Then ignored things again until Dec, and are pretty much keeping silent once again. We had intel reports come through our TOC that had a large impact on how we conducted operations that have never been mentioned. I still shake my head at that - some of the stuff is old news and would go a long way towards explaining why certain decisions were made, but they don't bring it up. As much as I blame the media for not painting an accurate picture of what goes on over there, I also blame the administration for not painting any picture. So, where they are on anything in public is of little consequence to me.

I know that the general was on the Hill, or at least was supposed to be. I assume whatever info he gave the congressmen will be looked into. I also know that in 1998 there were huge concerns about large quantities of stuff that couldn't be accounted for, and there was no proof they had been destroyed. Are we supposed to believe that a regime that methodically kept records of everything did not have any records of destroying its WMDs? That is a leap of faith I can't take.

[kenwoodallpromos]

Hussein precticed what I call "intimidation by bad accounting"!

[hcap]

WMds was part of a total package, a bill of goods sold to justify "pre-emptive" war. The new "bush doctrine"

The other lynchpin was Saddams' willingness and glee in giving them to terorists like bin laden.

Paul Pillar, the head of the CIA's Middle East bureau from 2000 to 2005 makes it clear in a new article in Foreign Affairs magazine, that under the Bush administration, "official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions." Instead, "intelligence was misused to justify decisions already made. Although he supports the case for the possibility of WMDs, he says that there had been no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and bin Laden. Pillar, who saw every scrap of intelligence about the Middle East, takes it further, saying the claim by Bush and others "did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed."

In other words, they made it up.

Look Iraq was the weakest of the three "axis of evil" powers. The only one of the three with constant overflights.

North Korea was in the lead in terms of insanity of heads of state, and Iran had a much larger and more well equiped armed forces. North Korea and Pakistan in fact were the ones to watch along with criminal elements and underpayed nuclear scientists of the old soviet union. These were the real danger points of nuclear proliferation. The loose cannons of nuclear weapon technology.

Many countries had biological and chemical stockpiles. Quite a few had lunatic leaders. Some had greater ties to terrorists. The unique combination of factors that was claimed making Iraq an immediate threat was exagerated.

Bottom line rush to war.
Ironically Islamofacsism your new bogeyman was non-existant in Iraq before we invaded. The fundamentalist Islamists now are proliferating. Self fullfilling phrophecy

[hcap]

"As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq," Pillar writes. "The first request I received from any administration policy-maker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war."

[hcap]

So you guys bring up Sada as proof of Saddam ditching WMDs in Syria. The word of an ex-general. OK I will bring up some exes as well.

Karen Kwiatkowski retired as a USAF lieutenant colonel after spending her final four and a half years working at the Pentagon. She accelerated her retirement "because of the ethical difficulties brought on by witnessing the misuse of intelligence in order to support an agenda for an unnecessary, unwarranted war of choice against Iraq." She describes the current U.S. military and civilian leadership as "politicized, emasculated, obedient to the bureaucracy and ignorant of the Constitution."

Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel in the U.S. Army, a decorated Vietnam vet, and a life-long Republican who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, has recently stated that Powell’s February 2003 speech before the United Nations that sought to justify the impending war against Iraq was "a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council." He further stated that "there were major doubts inside the intelligence community about everything that was being said about the Iraq threat, even as Powell's speech was being planned and delivered."

Jeffrey Record, a professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, writes in Bounding the Global War on Terrorism, published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, that the war in Iraq "has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda." The nature and parameters of the global war on terror (GWOT) "remain frustratingly unclear." The declared objectives of the GWOT are "unrealistic." The goals of the GWOT are "politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable." The GWOT is "strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over too many ends."

Lieutenant General William Odom (Ret.)) calls the war in Iraq "the greatest strategic disaster in our history, not in terms of its present body count, but rather because of its radiating consequences for the region and the world." Invading Iraq "was never in the U.S.’ interests and has not become so."

James Madison, ex president on how the state uses war to strip its citizens of their liberties:

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.

[lsbets]

Great to see that you know how to use large type and bold in posting. Congratulations on your skills. Would you like a similar parade of folks who point to evidence showing things like Russia helping Iraq move its WMDs before the war? Or how about Saddam saying terrorists could easily use chemical weapons against the US, but they would never get those weapons from Iraq (ha ha, wink, wink)?

[hcap]

You asked me about ex-general Sada. Basically his word only. I would rather trust the word of the folks I posted. I would think not all of them are disgruntled exes. More like whistleblowers.

So far the administration has also admitted no WMDs. And no colloborative relationship with osama. (Except of course wild card dead-eye dick). They will reluctantly go as far as saying not their fault-the dog ate their homework-they had bad info. (ha ha, wink, wink)
Meanwhile slam-dunk tenet gets' a medal of honor?

You can parade all of sources you want. Only thing is your guys need one pesky thing. Evidence. My guys at least so far have been correct by the facts of the outcome, and even the bushies haven't disputed the outcome.
PR? Nah reality, they and your parade of experts cannot make your case without evidence of stockpiles. We're still waiting**.
Great to see that you know how to use large type and bold in posting. Congratulations on your skills.
**I won't rule it out yet but seems unlikely :jump:

[lsbets]

The thing is Hcap, we look at this very, very differently. We both acknowledge that Saddam Hussein had very large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. When I see none, I wonder what happenned to them. You figure he must have destroyed them. I see nothing that would lead me to believe Saddam suddenly decided that life would be much better if he did not have those weapons. I ask - where did they go, I don't think - see their not there, case closed. I don't need to see stockpiles to wonder what happenned to them. The fact that stockpiles were not found should be very, very troubling to everyone, because the question of where they went has not been answered one way or the other.

I haven't brought up the Saddam tapes yet in any large measure, because I am trying to sort out my opinion on them. Some things are obvious, Saddam was discussing how easy it was to play games with the weapons inspectors, and talked about terrorism coming to the US - and then added that of course Iraq would have nothing to do with that. William Tierny has some very strong things to say about the tapes and Nightline's translation of them, but after hearing an interview with Mr. Tierny, I have some questions about him - he seems to like to brag about how smart he is, etc, etc, etc ... so I am not sure how much credence I put in what he says (I view everyone with skepticism, no matter which side they come from, and this guy strikes me as a bit out there - so the next time I discount your heroic whistleblowers and I question their motives, remember this last statement).

[hcap]

Look, Saddam was a survivor. A smart and diabolical dictator. I don't trust him either. The question is were the threats posed by Iraq exagerated or not.

Even if one day you can show something hidden in Syria, it won't be anywhere or remotely as aggrandized by Powell before the UN. As I said earlier, it was a triangulation of factors presented to us to justify a pre-emptive attack.
1-There was the exageration of WMDs.
2-An exageration of an inconsequential relationship that existed between Iraq and osama.
3-But the scariest part for me is the rewriting of the existing foreign policy codifying pre-emptive war. The bush doctrine. The third exageration made official-overreaction as a new foreign policy. Justified the executive to choose war without accountabilty requirements

All of this was in the heady atmosphere of the wake of 911. Anthrax, duct tape and a terrorist under all our beds. Existential dire threats poised to wipe out our way of life. Bullshit. WWII, the cold war were threats that really mattered. Now of course bush has fed the relatively minor terrorist threat and created a more substantial one. Not on the level of the cold war. But enough to ratchet up a loose nuke scenario. Nuclear prolieration is the real issue. The GWOT is unable to handle that. If the 1/2 trillion SO FAR that Iraq has cost us, had been used to coral Pakistan and the ex soviet sources we would be a lot safer. Real control of our ports could have been financed.

You know my thoughts about this crew in office. Untrustable and incompetant.

And it seems evident in all the jockying by the administration for unlimited presidential power, we are caught up in the beginning of empire building within our republic. Iraq was the power play to inaugurate an endless war. Endless war allows all sorts of "yeah but we're at war" excuses for all sorts of abuses